How low can you go?

Or life as a limbo dancing. As in we’re living in limbo but still dancing.

This week we learnt that our tenants are leaving our house back in Sussex next week. That rather throws our finances into a bit of a fix as it will mean we’ll be paying the mortgage for our house again. Oh the irony – while we live our off grid lifestyle with no bath, no shower, no central heating, washing machine etc we’ll be paying each month for a fully fitted house back in our old life we’re no longer living in!

They are leaving because the house is on the market, it is us that have effectively given them notice by trying to sell the house even though they were welcome to stay there til it sold. We’ve already dropped the price once and it’s been on the market for a few months now but with no real interest. I am ever hopeful (you know me, mistress of optimism!) that it being vacant will make it more attractive to potential buyers and have fingers firmly crossed for a speedy sale now. We’ve talked about the house a lot these last few days and have all four made our peace with the fact that it is no longer our home, just a house we used to live in once upon a time.

So as ever more uncertainty clouds our here and now with us trapped right here unable to move further forward with building a home or investing in the croft fully until the house sells and our capital is freed up we find ourselves desperate to move forward with things. I was taking to our neighbour this morning and we were discussing grants and subsidies and whether various hoops are worth jumping through. We discussed how living so close to nature means the spring makes you feel precisely like a coiled spring – full of promise and anticipation, expectation and the need to expend energy, make things happen and more things along. All around us buds are bursting into flower, seeds are sprouting, animals are pairing up and building nests or rearing their young. Life is starting over again for this year and it allows us to wipe the slate clean and do just the same – start afresh for this year, work out what we want to give birth to for this season and how we’re going to do it. Ideas are germinating, visions are clearing and the little things are begging for our attention.

It’s time to resign ourselves to some things being beyond our control and let them take care of themselves while we focus on the here and now, the stuff we can control, the bits we are in charge of.